Are economics students happier or less happy than other students in the social sciences?

A pair of German economists note that while scholars in their field have vigorously begun analyzing the economics of happiness, no one has studied the happiness of economists themselves. Not till now, anyhow. 

Justus Haucap, of Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, and Ulrich Heimeshoff, of the University of Bochum, surveyed 918 students of economics and other social sciences in 2005, then estimated how studying each of the different fields affected individual life satisfaction. They reported their results in a paper titled, "The Happiness of Economists: Estimating the Causal Effect of Studying Economics on Subjective Well-Being."

The news is good — for...

An "A student" takes a professor to task in an e-mail rant, rife with misspellings, for lacking the ability to recognize brilliance.

Is this really "the greatest student email ever written"? What's the most outrageous student e-mail message you've ever received?

Via AlterNet

If your son attends a college rife with guns and drugs, you shouldn't have to pay full freight. That seems to be the thinking behind one father's alleged attempt to blackmail the dean of students at Harcum College, a two-year institution in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

When the father, Vincent Guadini, himself an alumnus of Harcum, received a bill for $3,000 in unpaid dorm fees for his son Michael, he allegedly e-mailed the dean asking him to waive the fees in return for Mr. Guadini's silence about drugs and guns on the campus, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Fox News reports that county officials found the accusations about the college to be false. Mr. Guadini, a former police officer, now faces counts of extortion, attempted theft, and other...

As 2009 neared its end, writers and journalists began scrambling to name the decade. The New York Times weighed in, as did Slate, and The New Yorker, and probably several other publications that we subscribe to but never find time to read.

The American Historical Association asked its members for suggestions, and this week it listed the nominees and asked readers to vote on a...

A chemistry lecturer at Northwestern University plucks a feathered intruder from the classroom:

Via ChemistryBlog

From our in box, a press release from a tobacco-retailers group that assails a peer-reviewed health study and argues that, essentially, a smoking pipe is no smoking gun:

Premium Cigar Group Labels Columbia Study as Corrupt Misuse of Junk Science

Columbus, Georgia March 3, 2010 — Conclusions made by a new study of cigar and pipe smoking by researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center are not supported by the study’s findings, says the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association, a not-for-profit group of premium cigar retailers and manufacturers.  

The study, published last month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was funded primarily by grants from the National Heart,...

Tens of millions of disabled people in developing countries who need wheelchairs don’t have them, and many of those with wheelchairs own models that aren’t versatile enough to use both indoors and on rugged terrain. Amos G. Winter’s new creation, the "leveraged freedom chair," might ease those problems. 

Mr. Winter, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built...

Austin Sendek, a physics student at the University of California at Davis, has proposed that the California slang word "hella" be approved as a new prefix to describe 10²⁷, according to a report by Physics World.

A Facebook page in support of Mr. Sendek's effort had attracted more than 23,000 fans as of this writing.

The International Committee for Weights and Measures added "yotta" (10²⁴⁾ and "zetta" (10²¹⁾ to the International System of Units in 1991. 

Ian Mills, the University of Reading chemist who presides over the Consultative Committee for Units, an advisory body to the weights and measures...

Last month the Yale Daily News ran a five-part series on students' sex lives, using pie charts and bar graphs to depict such things as the frequency of couplings (and soloings) on the campus. Now the Yale College dean's office is inviting students to submit anonymous essays about their campus sexual experiences for a new online collection called "sex@Yale," the student newspaper reports.

Melanie Boyd, director of undergraduate studies in women’s gender and sexuality studies and the dean's special adviser on gender issues, told the...